This invention is directed to linguistic expression processing. More particularly, the invention provides a highly compact linguistic expression verification, correction, and storage system. The invention can be used, for example, to provide text processing on word processors and microprocessor-controlled typewriters.
Text processing systems facilitate the production of printed documents. Capabilities of the systems generally include text entry, editing, and justification, as well as spelling verification and correction. Early text processing systems operated on large mainframe computers, where storage requirements and computational efficiency were typically of limited concern.
With the advent of smaller microprocessor-based computing systems, e.g., word processors, the storage requirements and computational efficiency of text processing software have become very important. These smaller systems include only a limited amount of memory and, thus, have little capacity for storage of spelling dictionaries and software. Moreover, the microprocessor speeds and peripheral memory access times of these systems are relatively slow, thereby creating a need for efficient verification and correction code.
To date, the art has failed to provide satisfactory spelling verification and correction software for use on microprocessor systems. In general, the available software compensates for limited storage space by maintaining short or impoverished spelling dictionaries (e.g., having fewer entries or lacking capitalization and hyphenation information), resulting in the recognition of fewer correctly spelled words and the replacement of fewer incorrectly spelled words. Similarly, the software compensates for limited computational power by reducing program complexity, thereby further decreasing verification and correction capabilities.
An object of this invention, therefore, is to provide an improved linguistic expression processor. More particularly, an object is to provide a spelling verifier, a spelling corrector, and a dictionary database which can operate effectively on word processors, microprocessor-controlled typewriters, and other computing systems of reduced processing and storage capacity
Another object of the invention is to provide a compact and efficient linguistic expression processor which retains, in addition to word spellings, hyphenation and capitalization information.
A further object of this invention is to provide an improved spelling verification and correction system which corrects a high percentage of misspellings and which operates with sufficiently high speed for convenient on-line use and operator interaction.
Still another object of the invention is to provide improved data storage and data organization techniques for use with digital data processing apparatus text databases.
Other objects of the invention are evident throughout the description which follows.